With
her unbridled hostility towards Israel, the EU's foreign policy chief
Catherine Ashton provides us with an abject lesson in what happens when a
government places its emotional aspirations above its national
interests.
Since the establishment of the State
of Israel, many of Israel's elite have aspired to be embraced by
Europe. In recent years, nearly every government has voiced the hope of
one day seeing Israel join the EU.
To a
significant degree, Israel's decision to recognize the PLO in 1993 and
negotiate with Yasser Arafat and his deputies was an attempt by Israel's
political class to win acceptance from the likes of Ashton and her
continental comrades. For years the EU had criticized Israel for
refusing to recognize the PLO.
Until 1993,
Israel's leaders defied Europe because they could tell the difference
between a national interest and an emotional aspiration and preferred
the former over the latter. And now, Israel's reward for preferring
European love to our national interest and embracing our sworn enemy is
Catherine Ashton.
To put it mildly, Ashton is
not a friend of Israel. Indeed, she is so ill-disposed against Israel
that she seems unable to focus for long on anything other than bashing
it. Her obsession was prominently displayed in March when she was unable
to give an unqualified condemnation of the massacre of French Jewish
children by a French Muslim. Ashton simply had to use her condemnation
as yet another opportunity to bash Israel.
Her
preoccupation with Israel was again on display on Tuesday. During a
boilerplate, vacuous speech about President Bashar Assad's slaughter of
his fellow Syrians, apropos of nothing the baroness launched into an
unhinged, impassioned, and deeply dishonest frontal assault against
Israel.
The woman US President Barack Obama has
empowered to lead the West's negotiations with Iran regarding its
illicit nuclear weapons program stood at the podium in the European
Parliament and threw an anti-Israel temper tantrum.
The
same woman who couldn't be bothered to finish her speech about Assad's
massacre of children, the same woman who is so excited about her Iranian
negotiating partners' body language that she doesn't think it is
necessary to give them an ultimatum about ending their quest for a
nuclear bomb, seemed to lack a sufficiently harsh vocabulary to express
her revulsion with Jewish "settlers."
As she put it, "We are also seriously concerned by recent and increasing incidents of settler violence which we all condemn."
It's
not clear what "recent and increasing incidents of settler violence"
she was referring to. But in all likelihood, she didn't have a specific
incident in mind. She probably just figured that those sneaky Jews are
always up to no good.
ASIDE FROM condemning
imaginary Israeli crimes more emphatically than real Syrian crimes,
Ashton's speech involved a presentation of the EU's policy on Israel and
the Palestinians.
That policy is based on
three premises: The EU falsely claims that all Israeli communities
beyond the 1949 armistice lines are illegal.
It
rejects Israel's legal right to assert its authority over Area C - the
area of Judea and Samaria that is empty of Palestinian population
centers.
And it will only soften its anti-Israel positions if the Palestinians do so first.
Aside
from its jaw-dropping animosity towards Israel, what is notable about
the EU's position is that it is actually far more hostile to Israel than
the Palestinians' position towards Israel as that position was revealed
in the agreements that the Palestinians signed with Israel in the past.
In those agreements, the Palestinians accepted continued sole Israeli
control over Area C. They did not require Israel to end the construction
of Jewish communities outside the 1949 armistice lines. The peace
process ended when the Palestinians moved closer to the EU's position.
The
EU's antipathy towards Israel as personified in Ashton's behavior
teaches us two important lessons. First, it is often hard to tell our
friends from our foes. Israelis - particularly those born to families
that emigrated from Europe - have traditionally viewed Europe as the
last word in enlightened democracy and sophistication and style. We
wanted to be like them. We wanted to be accepted by them.
Indeed
we were so swept away by the thought that they might one day love us
back that we adopted policies that were inimical to our national
interest and so weakened us tremendously.
It
never occurred to us that the fact that Europe insisted that we adopt
policies that undercut our national survival meant that the Europeans
wished us ill.
They seemed so nice.
The
second thing we learn from Ashton's anti-Israel mania is that when we
engage in foreign policy, we need to base our judgments about our
ability to influence the behavior of our foreign counterparts on a
sober-minded assessment of two separate things: our interlocutor's
ideology and his interests. In Ashton's case, both parameters make clear
that there is no way to win her over to Israel's side. She is
ideologically opposed to Israel. And the citizens of Europe are becoming
more and more hostile to Israel and to Jews.
These
twin parameters for judging foreign leaders and representatives came to
mind on Wednesday with the publication of State Comptroller Micha
Lindenstrauss's critical report on the government's handling of the
Turkish-government supported, pro-Hamas flotilla in May 2010. Perhaps
the most remarkable revelation in the report is that up until a week
before the flotilla set sail, led by the infamous Mavi Marmara, Prime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu was under the impression that he had reached
a deal with Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Netanyahu
believed that through third parties, including the US government and
then-Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, he had convinced Erdogan to
cancel the flotilla. He had a deal.
The fact
that Netanyahu thought he had a deal with Erdogan is startling and
unnerving. It means that Netanyahu was willing to ignore the basic facts
of Erdogan's nature and the way that Erdogan perceives his interests,
in favor of a fiction.
By May 2010 it was
abundantly clear that Erdogan was not a friend of Israel. He had been in
power for eight years. He had already ended Turkey's strategic alliance
with Israel. In 2006, Erdogan was the first major international leader
and NATO member to host Hamas terror chief Ismail Haniyeh. His embrace
of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood made clear that he was Israel's
enemy. It is a simple fact that you cannot be allied with Israel and
with the Muslim Brotherhood at the same time. The same year he allowed
Iran to use Turkish territory to transfer weaponry to Hezbollah during
the Second Lebanon War.
In 2008, Erdogan openly
sided with Hamas against Israel in Operation Cast Lead. In 2009, he
called President Shimon Peres a murderer to his face.
By
the time the flotilla was organized, Erdogan had used Turkey's position
as a NATO member to effectively end the US-led alliance's cooperative
relationship with Israel, by refusing to participate in military
exercises with Israel.
THE NATURE OF the
flotilla organizers was also known in the months ahead of its departure
for Gaza. The IHH's ties to al-Qaida had been documented. Netanyahu's
staff knew that the IHH was so extreme that the previous Turkish
government had barred its operatives from participating in humanitarian
relief efforts after the devastating 1999 earthquake. They feared the
group would use its relief efforts to radicalize the local population.
In
and of itself, the fact that Erdogan was openly supporting IHH's
leading role in the flotilla told Israel everything it needed to know
about the Turkish leader's intentions. And yet, up until a week before
the flotilla set sail, Netanyahu was operating under the impression that
he had struck a deal with Erdogan.
It is likely that Netanyahu was led to believe that a deal had been crafted by the Americans.
Obama
is not the only American leader that has been seduced into believing
that Erdogan and his Islamist AKP Party are trustworthy strategic
partners for the US. Many key members of Congress share this delusional
view.
According to a senior congressional
source, Turkey's success in winning over the US Congress is the result
of a massive Turkish lobbying effort. Through two or three front groups,
the Turkish government has become one of the most active lobbying
bodies in Washington. It brings US lawmakers and their aides on luxury
trips to Turkey and hosts glittering, glamorous receptions and parties
in Washington on a regular basis. And these efforts have paid off.
Turkey's
bellicosity towards Israel as well as Greece and Cyprus has caused it
no harm in Washington. Its request to purchase a hundred F-35 Joint
Strike Fighters faced little serious opposition. The US continues to bow
to its demands to disinvite Israel from international forum after
international forum - most recently the upcoming US-hosted
counter-terrorism summit in Istanbul.
Certainly
Turkey's strategic transformation under Erdogan's leadership from a
pro-Western democracy into an anti-Western Islamist police state has
dire implications for American national interests. And the Americans
would be well-served to look beyond the silken invitations to Turkish
formal events at five-star hotels and see what is actually happening in
the sole Muslim NATO member-state. But whether the US comes to its
senses or not is its business.
Israel had no business buying into the fiction in 2010 that Erdogan could be reasoned with.
True,
today no one in Israel operates under that delusion anymore. But the
basic phenomenon of our leaders failing to distinguish between what they
want to happen and what can happen continues to exist.
Ours
is a dangerous world and an even more dangerous neighborhood.
Everywhere we look we see cauldrons of radicalism and sophisticated
weaponry waiting to explode. The threat environment Israel faces today
is unprecedented.
At this time we cannot afford to be seduced by our dreams that things were different than they are. They are what they are.
We
do have options in this contest. To maximize those options we need to
ground our actions and assessments in clear-headed analyses and
judgments of the people we are faced with. Their actions will be
determined by their beliefs and their perception of their interests -
not by our pretty face.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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